Peter Greene provides an overview of the three states that will be voting on vouchers on November 5. Vouchers have been on state ballots nearly two dozen times. They have never won. They are usually defeated overwhelmingly. Voucher advocates know this, and they usually try to kill state referenda because they know they will lose.
Of the three states that will conduct voucher referenda, Colorado has the trickiest ballot. It currently has charter schools but voucher advocates want the state constitution to go further. They are using bland, deceptive language to make vouchers legal, without actually using the word “vouchers.”
In a few weeks, Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska are giving voters a chance to vote on taxpayer-funded school vouchers.
Colorado
Colorado voters will have the chance to amend the state constitution to enshrine school choice. The proposed amendment is short and sweet, asserting that “parents have the right to direct the education of the children” and “each K-12 child has the right to school choice.”
Colorado is no stranger to school choice. Students can travel across district boundaries to other school districts, and in 1993, Colorado became the third state to pass a charter school law.
Advance Colorado, a conservative anti-tax group, pushed the amendment. Supporters insist that the intention is simply to preserve the thirty-year-old charter program. But the wide-open language of the proposal, which specifies that ”school choice includes neighborhood, charter, private, and home schools, open enrollment options, and future innovations in education,” clearly covers more than just the charter school program.
In fact, in addition to opening the door to school vouchers, the proposal seems to open up some other possibilities. If a student is denied admission to a private school for any reason, can the student’s family demand their constitutional right to school choice? If a parent disagrees with any element of a school’s curriculum, can the parent demand their constitutional right to “direct the education” of their child? Kevin Welner of the Colorado-based National Education Policy Center calls the proposal “a ‘full employment for lawyers'” act.
Kentucky
In 2022, Kentucky voucher supporters suffered a major setback when the state supreme court ruled the voucher funding mechanism violated the state constitution. Supporters had set up a tax credit scholarship program in which folks could donate to a voucher scholarship program and get a dollar for dollar tax credit.
Proponents argue (as Betsy DeVos did when she proposed a federal version of this system) that this does not constitute spending taxpayer funds on private or religious schools because the money is never actually in the government’s hands, despite the fact that the government will then face a revenue shortfall.
Section 184 of the Kentucky constitution has some straightforward language about funding education, including:
No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools until the question of taxation is submitted to the legal voters, and the majority of the votes cast at said election shall be in favor of such taxation.
Kentucky’s Attorney General, arguing for the voucher plan, tried to assert a reading of the law that allowed for tax credit scholarships. The court replied, “We respectfully decline to construe the Constitution in a way that would avoid its plain meaning.”
Then in 2023, Franklin County Circuit Court Judge Phillip Shepherd ruled against the law set up to fund charter schools in the state.
So in January of this year, HB 2 was proposed, a constitutional amendment that would expand all that restrictive public school language and free lawmakers to fund charter schools and vouchers. With one sentence, vouchers would become constitutional in Kentucky:
The General Assembly may provide financial support for the education of students outside the system of common schools.
Nebraska
In May of 2023, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed into law LB 753, creating tax credit vouchers for subsidizing private schools, called “Opportunity Scholarships.”. Opponents circulated a petition to challenge the law by putting it on the ballot. They needed 60,000 signatures to force the issue onto the ballot. At the end of August, 2023, they had 117,000, and the measure was headed for the November 2024 ballot.
In April of 2024, voucher supporters tried an end run around the petition. LB 1402 repealed the Opportunity Scholarship Act and launched a new school voucher program. The new bill came from Senator Lou Ann Linehan, who also authored the Opportunity Scholarships Act. Governor Jim Pillen approved the bill on April 25.
Arguing that the repeal of Opportunity Scholarships rendered the November vote on the program pointless, Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evman pulled the ballot issue. Voters can’t repeal a law that has already been repealed.
In 67 days, the coalition of opponents gathered the necessary signatures—again. A lawsuit and a threat by Evman to pull the measure from the ballot were struck down by the Nebraska Supreme Court in a 7-0 decision. Nebraskans will vote on vouchers for their state.
These are three different approaches to the question of taxpayer-funded school vouchers, but they share the unusual feature of putting voucher programs to a public vote. All school voucher programs in the U. S. were passed into law by legislatures, sometimes over strong objections of the taxpayers. No taxpayer-funded school voucher program has ever survived a public vote.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Would be interested to see how these ballot measures are polling.
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They shouldn’t survive this vote as well.
The charter school scam is so obvious, so…Republican. Just another way to make the taxpayers pay for the privileged.
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FINANCIAL FRAUD BY CHARTER SCHOOLS IS STEALING TAXPAYER MONEY FROM GENUINE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and pocketed by private corporate “school choice” charter school operators that the IG investigation declared: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals.”
In the 1990’s, hedge fund billionaires discovered that they could profit from the “school choice” movement and so they took over by founding corporate chains of charter schools that have reaped billions of dollars since then through various mechanisms, such as REITs that collect exorbitant lease and rental profits from charter schools…as the expense of public schools.
Charter schools claim to be non-profit. And yet, There are numerous schemes for running a non-profit for profit. For example, in two reports — “Chartered for Profit” and “Chartered for Profit II” — The Network for Public Education explains the most common schemes: Some charters lease their buildings back from related businesses. In one New York case, a chartering organization leased a space from the diocese, then leased that space to its own charter school for over TEN TIMES the amount it was actually paying.
Then there are “sweeps” contracts, where a non-profit charter hires a for-profit management organization to handle everything, in return for nearly every dollar the charter takes in. As one contract cited in the report states, the management organization receives “as remuneration for its services an amount equal to the total revenue received” by the school “from all revenue sources.”
In many cases, a non-profit charter school simply serves as a pass through for money headed to a for-profit business.
THE MOST EFFECTIVE STRATEGY FOR DISMANTLING THE CHARTER SCHOOL MOVEMENT is to simply require that charter schools file THE SAME, EXACT PUBLIC DOMAIN QUARTERLY AND ANNUAL BUDGET REPORTS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE REQUIRED TO FILE.
Every state in our nation should have that same common sense accountability requirement for charter schools.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a “public charter school”. Charter school operators spend a lot of taxpayer money telling taxpayers that charter schools are “public” schools — but they are not. As the Supreme Courts of Washington State and New York State have ruled, charter schools are actually private schools because THEY FAIL TO PASS THE MINIMUM TEST for being genuine public schools; that is — They aren’t run by school boards who are elected by, and therefore under the control of and accountable to voting taxpayers, that is, THE PUBLIC. All — ALL — charter schools are corporations run by private parties or are religious organizations. Taxpayers have no say in how their tax dollars are spent in charter schools.
CHARTER STUDENTS LOSE GROUND: The Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) — which is funded by pro-charter organizations — has reported that in the case of popular online charter schools, students actually lose ground in both reading and math — but online charter schools are the fastest-growing type of charter school because they make it easiest to skim away public tax dollars. CREDO has been conducting years-long research into the educational quality of charter schools and yet even this charter-school-funded research center’s findings are that in general charter schools don’t do any better academically than genuine public schools.
“SCHOOL CHOICE”: The catch-phrase “school choice” was concocted by racists following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that required racial integration in public schools. After that, racist organizations used racist politicians to conduct a decades-long attack that underfunded public schools and crippled their ability to provide the full measure of education and to “prove” that public schools were “failing”. That public school “failure” is an issue manufactured by racists organizations and politicians is well-documented in the book “The Manufactured Crisis”.
RACIAL RESEGREGATION of America’s school systems by the private charter school industry is so blatant and illegal that both the NAACP and ACLU have called for a stop to the formation of any more charter schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA summed it up, stating that charter schools are “a civil rights failure.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/29/report-the-department-of-education-has-spent-1-billion-on-charter-school-waste-and-fraud/#ab1fbdb27b64
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